Create your own Version of Microsoft BASIC for 6502
pagetable.com
pagetable.com
"Hrm, BASIC. This must be about the basics of computers, sounds like a good place to start."
http://www.voteview.com/gates.htm
http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.co.uk/2007/07/hasta-la-vista-p...
(based on an old apple story about Jobs vs Woz)
The license allowed Commodore to make improvements, but did not give Commodore any improvements Microsoft made - people like Bob Yannes at Commodore at the time thinks Microsoft basically assumed Commodore would come back asking for upgrades, and pay them more money, but Tramiel was famously tight with money.
In the end, had Gates managed to get $3 per copy, the C64 alone would have resulted in somewhere between $45m and $60m of income for Microsoft at a time when that actually was a lot of money for them.
I believe it was first when they did the Commodore 128 that Commodore negotiated a new deal with them.
I'm not sure of the details of the deal that Tramiel's Atari Corp signed with Digital Research when they licensed and ported GEM (a Mac/Lisa-like GUI framework) and GEMDOS (a spawn of CP/M 68k) for the Atari ST -- but after the initial port it never received any improvements from DR, though Atari themselves made some relatively minor changes and bug fixes later. But it was a potentially very good operating system that failed to improve significantly until it was too late (Atari hired the author of and acquired a set of open source Unix-like extensions in the early 90s, but by then the writing was on the wall for the platform.)
With AmigaBASIC 1.2 from MicroSoft but probably without any input from Bill Gates.
My first programming session involved changing the parameters of a ellipse drawing routine. Which was AFAIR from a programming tutorial that was part of the manual.
One of the bugs involved hacky use of the top 8-bit of pointers to store flags - this worked on 68000 CPU's as thy only had a 24 bit address bus and ignored the rest, but would cause crashes on machines with faster CPUs/accelerators (there are patches, but AmigaBASIC was dropped for later AmigaOS releases anyway)
> My first programming session involved changing the parameters of a ellipse drawing routine. Which was AFAIR from a programming tutorial that was part of the manual.
This is one of the Commodore traditions I really miss: The manuals tended to start with programming, and also included fairly detailed schematics. I know many other home computers did this, but I think Commodore with the Amiga is one of the ones that persisted with it the longest, and were most systematic about it.
The VIC-20 manual I think is one of the best early examples of this approach [1], where the manual starters with programming right after showing how to unpack and connect the computer.
[1] https://archive.org/details/Personal_Computing_On_The_VIC-20...
In large part the C64 and Apple II had their success because it was easy for owners to make the transition from hobbyist to programmer by starting with the built-in BASIC and just working up. BASIC was right there in front of you, always accessible, and you basically _had_ to learn it to use the machine. So it created a ready supply of new content producers.
To program the ST effectively you really needed a C compiler, but of course back in those days that was not cheap at all or even readily available (or very fun on a machine with no hard drive, which was the common situation.)
I can't help but wonder if those platforms could have had better success if they'd just shipped out of the box with a decent BASIC, an assembler, and maybe even a C compiler. Or at least had that available on launch day for a price accessible to hobbyists.
It's sad that they didn't last, but the chip was simply an evolutionary dead end. I've recently thought about finding one to give my grandson in an attempt to pry away from a tablet his parents gave him.
The crop of tablet/cell-addicted kids is a sad state of affairs.
As for 6502 being an evolutionary dead end -- it's still being made, and still being used in actual products. You'd be surprised what still has a 6502 or 6502-based core in it. It is a wonderful chip - simple easy to learn ISA, absolutely stellar interrupt responsiveness, and easy to interface.
Speaking as one of them, yes. They're hard to program, no fun, and even the BASIC offering won't let you do much.
But it also resulted in things like AmigaE gaining a lot of popularity [1], and I suspect a lot of the reason ARexx got so widespread was because it took over some the space a decent Basic would have. Incidentaly, E had a big leg up on C on the Amiga because the C compilers were notoriously slow, while the AmigaE compiler was blazing fast (it was written entirely in assembler, and did things like reading the entire source into RAM and treating it as an array)
Keep in mind that the company started out supplying a Fortran compiler for the Altair 8800. On paper tape no less.
And their BASIC interpreter was the BASIC to have for a decade or more.
Excel (supposedly the last MS product with actual Gates written code inside) got started on Apple hardware.
Is that true about Excel? In one interview with Gates I watched, he commented that QBasic was the last product he wrote.
I would suppose maybe at some point they did (not sure on this) but it's long been my understanding that BASIC was their start.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft: Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800: The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.